How to write a background for the Dissertation
Tagged: Dissertation Writing
Establishing the background of the research is just as significant as establishing the findings, which serve as the foreground of the study. The in-depth idea of your research will be established by a well-written background, which will also encourage readers to continue reading your dissertation.
The study's background is a particularly difficult topic for researchers to tackle. Separating the background from the literature review, which are both important components of any research article, is another typical issue authors run into. Despite the frequent confusion between the two names, each has a distinct function. The fundamentals of writing the background will thus be covered in this guide, along with an explanation of how it differs from the literature review.
The background of the study
The context of the research is established by the study's history. This section discusses why the research issue at hand is significant and necessary for comprehending the study's primary points. The background often makes up the opening portion of a thesis and explains why the study is necessary to perform and the reason for selecting the topic as well as summarising its objectives.
How to structure the background
The researcher often provides a brief history of the literary trends that led to the present study topic in this part. If the research is multidisciplinary, it should explain how the many disciplines are related and what topics will be covered in each subject.
Authors should also quickly summarise the most important advancements in their study area and pinpoint the most critical gaps that require filling. This part should thus include a summary of your research. It should be structured as follows:
- What can be said generally about the topic?
- What are the areas that require filling or the missing sections?
- What purpose does it serve to fill those gaps?
- What are the purpose and hypothesis of the research?
In light of this, the background section should highlight the primary goals of the study while also giving a comprehensive overview of the subject of your research. Please make sure that you just present the most important and pertinent elements of the research that has led to your objectives. Do not expand on them; the literature review section is the proper place for this. To highlight the advancement in the subject and the gaps that need to be filled, the background section should present your results in a chronological order. The background section has to be prepared as a concise description of how you interpret earlier studies and should clearly describe the goals of your dissertation topic.
Creating an interesting background
Because the background contains a lot of information, it might drag on for a while and lose readers' interest. In order to make sure that the background is interesting, one should aim to create a narrative that centres around the main finding of the study.
Make sure the story stays true to the main topic and does not go off into a lengthy literature analysis. For readers to understand your research topic and see the holes that the research will fill, each notion should flow into the next.
How to write the background without making typical errors
Avoiding certain errors is important when creating a successful background. The following are the most typical errors made when writing the background:
- A background shouldn't be too lengthy or underly short. Keep your writing succinct while concentrating on giving all the necessary data.
- Avoid being ambiguous. Writing in a way that does not make the point clear to the reader defeats the purpose of providing background information, therefore while expressing yourself, keep in mind that the reader is not familiar with your study in-depth.
- Don't talk about irrelevant topics. Try to focus your discussion on the key elements of your research issue, such as the gaps in the existing body of knowledge, the uniqueness of the study, and the need of doing the study.
- Avoid being careless. Try to structure the work properly. If you don't cover the subjects in a chronological order, the reader may become confused about the developments in the subject.
How is the background different from the literature review?
It might be challenging for some researchers to distinguish between the study background and the literature review. The main purpose of the literature review section is to provide evidence for the stated hypothesis in the background section. The research you referenced in the background part should all be properly described in this section, which should be more extensive.
Along with discussing current patterns, it should go into detail about each study that serves as support for the current study. One must conduct a comprehensive literature search on several studies that are connected to the overall subject of your study before writing this part. This will provide the readers an overview of the subject matter of your study. After that, you should give a more specialised overview of the particular research connected to the precise goal of the study.
To help readers understand the development and advancement of the discipline, it would be excellent to group them topically and analyse them chronologically. To illustrate how the various themes have developed through time, it is best to explore them separately and in historical order. This will show what has been accomplished and what has to be done moving forward. Usually, after the background section, the literature review is written.
